The Art of Drowning
by fiona249
Summary: Sometimes, it's easiest to drown. To just let the whole world go. Blair Waldorf is just finding this out. Pre-series, mentions of bulimia and depression. One-shot.


You find there is a strange pleasure in letting yourself sink. In drowning. In allowing yourself to be swallowed, be consumed by something other than your own life.

Ultimately, it's a kind of suicide – whether you're being consumed by love, lust, ideals, or even hope, you are consciously choosing to ignore what you are in favour of something else.

Never realising that someday, when you try and swim to the surface, there might not be a surface there anymore.

_You _might not be there anymore.

You only realise this one day when you are bent over in the bathroom, having eaten three pies, and you have never felt emptier. What are you anymore, behind neuroses and disorders? Behind the wall of selfishness, the wall of artifice and affectations, the wall of _Blair Waldorf._

You are a warrior, shielded by your arrogance, with your tongue as your weapon. Every snappy comment – every humiliated foe – is only another moment of respite from the constant fear. The constant fear that you are _not enough_.

You are empty and _what if they see that_? What if they see you are barely human anymore, having allowed yourself to become a walking cliché. You play the part of the rich bitch but you no longer remember what you were before that. Behind all your layers of lies, there is only a quivering lump of self-interest and pure terror.

Other people, they're shields too. The _best friend_ and _the boyfriend_ and _the minions_ and _my happy family_. All in their little places. Someday you will have a husband, three kids and maybe even a purebred dog to complete the image. Or maybe not.

Someday you will be dead.

You need to be loved – you think that will fill the hole in the way bingeing can't. You wonder if sex will fill the hole. You wonder if you will die alone, your life slowly ebbing as people chatter and laugh and dance. You wonder if you are dying now.

Your need to be loved means you wish you were beautiful - makes you think that even if you're ugly inside, maybe you can somehow be beautiful outside, like Serena is. Slender and beautiful. Your mother has always told you that you need to lose weight. And it starts like that, but it balloons so fast that it makes your head spin. It becomes something else. It becomes you.

You are empty – you eat to be full. And when that only makes you feel sick and disgusting as well as empty, you throw it all back up. You can feel it – feel your body devouring itself. Eaten up by yourself: the ultimate binge.

They say bulimics don't realise what they're doing, but you do. You are slowly dying. You can feel it, in the protruding bones of your hand, the hollows of your face, the ugly press of your ribs. Your bones feel like they are about to burst out of your skin. You can feel it in the effort it takes to breathe, the unspeakable, awful difficulty of dragging the air in – forcing your lungs to expand, billow up until it hurts, and then expelling it painfully. You can feel it in your heart, quickly and agonisingly beating against you, it's noise always in your ears.

Soon, you will be dead.

It is nearly impossible to walk, to speak. It is like you are living in honey. Drowning in honey. It pulls at you as you try to walk, making it so hard to move, and fills your mouth as you speak.

And the light – there's something wrong with it! Some days everything is wreathed in grey shadows, and you are walking through a world that is nothing but ghosts. Other people are outside the bubble that you hide in, indistinct and irrelevant.

Other days are just the opposite, though – normally these are the days when you've binged more. These days the world is too fucking bright, it hurts your eyes. It's all too real, too loud, too hard. People are noisy and excessive, with their fake laughter and bright colours and the way they pat your shoulder or hug you – well, it _hurts_.

You wonder why everyone else has some kind of equilibrium, but you just veer back and forth between too much and too little. You wonder why you are the only one who can see how wrong, how basically _wrong_, the world is; how wrong it is that you can think of your own death without flinching; how wrong it is that you are empty and they are filled with life.

You'd think after all this time it would be easier.

You make a decision when you vomit up blood. _Enough_, you think, your self-interest kicking in. You can't hurt the people who care about you – but then, there are woefully few of those, aren't there? And they don't love you. They love the vivacious mask, the funny story, the bitchy girl. They don't love you. They can't love you, because there isn't a person left to love. And even when there was – how could they have loved her when you didn't?

But you're not sure you want to die, so you decide _it stops now_ anyway. You decide you'll do what you have to.

You pull him into a room and kiss him frantically. It's messy and dirty and it hurts your mouth to be pressed so hard against his but you welcome the pain because pain is the only thing that is honest. He isn't honest, pushing you away and assuring you it isn't you, but this should be special, you deserve more. You don't deserve anything – can't he see that? You know it's an excuse, a lie.

You're not so sure you wanted sex anyway. Maybe you just didn't want to die a virgin, because fuck it, this is your life, and you only get one! And maybe, if you had sex, he'd always be with you a little. Just a little. Maybe if he touched your body instead of holding you at arms length he'd notice that there is something wrong.

Perhaps it's good he doesn't touch you. Sometimes you think if he touched you with the love you crave, you'd shatter, parts of you cascading to the floor, because every light touch seems to reverberate through you a little and you suspect his would reverberate a _lot_.

Perhaps you do want to die.

Your best friend starts watching you, suspiciously. You've stopped changing in front of her, and she notices. Shopping, you don't share a cubicle. One day she bursts in and than goes so pale you think she's going to faint.

You don't know how to explain that you're drowning. You have nothing more than this, this façade, this pretence of perfection, and that's why you're dying. You've already killed the person that you were, smothered her in this false perfection, and literally killing yourself is so attractive you can't run from it. At first it was about continuing the perfection – making sure you were attractive, skinny, beautiful – but now there is something so seductive about dying in the pursuit of perfection.

At least you'll be a skinny corpse. Maybe your mother will let you wear her finale dress in your coffin.

Your best friend jumps into the cubicle, into your world, without a second's hesitation. You can see the regret in her face though – _oh god I wish I didn't know this _– as her eyes wonderingly trace the sharp curves of your bones, the blue veins that sluggishly pump your cold blood, and the bruises that seem to get darker every day.

Before this, you never knew you injured yourself so much. Back when you had actual padding on you, actual flesh, bruises were rare. Now someone touches your hand and the next day you find a bruise, another one to add to your horrific collection.

She might wish she didn't know about it, but she still acts. You are in therapy – you're getting scolded by your mother – everyone's watching what you eat. They won't let you die.

But then, they don't realise you're already dead.

You let yourself drown long ago, all that's left is this woefully inadequate body.

You hate yourself and you hate her and you hate your mother and you hate your perfect boyfriend. You hate the fact that they had to find out this way, that they couldn't tell there was something wrong. You hate them because who are they, to have you let you drown? Who are they to interfere now, to act like they aren't too late? To pretend that the problems started when you started throwing up? They are all wisdom now, smugly thinking they have detected a murder before it occurs. But the real crime was committed years ago, and just because they stopped the cover-up doesn't mean they saved a life.

Yes, you find there is a pleasure in drowning. It's joyous, that moment when you finally give up and let yourself go, secure in the knowledge that none of it matters anymore. That you don't matter anymore. When you realise you don't have to try anymore, struggle anymore, fight anymore. You can rest forever.

But despite that pleasure – one day, you feel like you can breathe a little easier. You tell yourself you will have this, one day, one damn day of pretending you're whole. And then the next day, you do the same.

Perhaps dying isn't as easy as you thought.

You buy some clothes and realise to your surprise that they look good on you. And your friend, when she waits outside that damn therapist's office, she smiles cautiously when you come out and it just breaks your heart a little. Your boyfriend casually mentions how you'll be a scary mother, and then gets a stricken look because bulimia can make you infertile. You go to the park and feed the ducks with the woman who brought you up and she hands you the bread with fingers that shake just a little because she's scared at the thought of you dying. They're all scared - of you, and for you.

You realise, to your surprise, that even if they don't love the real you – even if there _is_ no real you, like you suspect – they still feel love for what's left. And you love them, too. You'd forgotten, but you do love them.

Perhaps you're still there, under all that shit, and despite all that shit.

There is a pleasure in drowning. But sometimes there can also be a pleasure in swimming. In rising to the surface and pulling cold air into your lungs until it nearly hurts. You hadn't realised that, but now you do. You realise a lot of things, and so you swim.

Someday, you'll be dead.

Today, you're _alive_.

* * *

><p><strong>Every damn time I tried to sit down and write the next chapter of my stupid regency story, I ended up with something introspective like this! My computer's practically choked with them! It is so far from what I usually write that I can't tell if it's any good. Also, a lot of it's based off my experiences with depression and bulimia, so it's kind of too personal for me to tell if it's good. I just thought I'd put it out there, and see what you guys think.<strong>


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